2009

from WhoseMoney Website
 

Paying the cost of your own slavery


"Money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name 'nomisma' - because it exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it." - Aristotle


Although money is an essential feature of modern life, very few of us understand exactly how it is produced. Its existence is simply taken for granted. Yet money, as Aristotle points out, isn’t something which occurs naturally: it is a man-made convenience, and its creation is authorized and controlled by man-made laws.

Even those who realize this tend to believe that the government is legally obliged to issue us with an adequate supply of money, as a public service. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

The Bank of England (In the strict sense, however, the Bank of England is not a government bank; it is a private corporation owned and controlled by its stockholders) issues only 3% of the total money supply, as notes and coins. The remaining 97% is created by commercial banks, in the form of loans to their customers.

In other words, increasing numbers of ordinary people are required to go deep into debt, just to provide the country with its basic means of exchange.

Monetary reformers are not against the concept of debt as a system of deferred payment. People should be free to borrow and lend money, and in this respect banks have a useful function to perform. What we oppose is dependence on mass borrowing as almost the sole mechanism for creating the country’s money stock.

Substituting pounds for dollars, our predicament is essentially the same as that described by Robert Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta at the time of the Great Depression:

“We are completely dependent upon the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation … If the banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system…

“It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied soon.”

Those defects are still unremedied.

We believe that a fundamental overhaul of the laws governing money creation is long overdue. The essential need for reform can be summed up in one sentence:

The bulk of the nation’s money supply should be issued by a democratically accountable public authority, and spent into circulation debt-free.

Write to your MP now...!

 






 



It's The System That Is The Problem

2009

from WhoseMoney Website

The abolition of poverty in the midst of plenty, important though that is,

is not the core of the problem.

It is conceivable that people might be provided for as well-fed slaves…

It has to be realized that not for thousands of years have the people of these islands been so completely enslaved as they are at the present, and that the primary characteristic of the slave is not bad treatment.

It is that he is without say in his own policy.
Major C.H. Douglas


This website has now been in existence for close on a year, and the articles and comment posted should make it clear exactly where we stand, as far as the need to pinpoint those responsible for our present dysfunctional financial system is concerned. But perhaps it’s time to state our position even more plainly.

All too often any discussion about money reform degenerates quickly from a focus on the drawbacks of using debt as our means of exchange, and realistic proposals for implementing a debt-free alternative, into a bitter whodunnit scrap, with claims and counter- claims attempting to pin the blame on one or other preferred villain of the piece.

The Venetians and the Dutch are favorite also-rans; but the principal contenders for the title of profiteers from the present debt-based monetary system are, without doubt, either “the British” (hot favorites among patriotic Americans) or “the Jews”.

No impartial investigation into the origins of debt-based finance can fail to note the importance of the Bank of England in its progress, or the adverse reactions of spokesmen for the British establishment to the fledgling American nation’s unconventional - and highly successful - monetary initiatives.

 

As the 'Moneymasters' documentary relates, persistent attacks were made by international financiers based in Europe and, in particular, the City of London, to scupper a debt-free means of exchange, both in the old colonies, and in the newly-emerged United States; and it seems clear that the prosperity of the British Empire was built on the ability to impose “free” trade on subjugated nations, backed by debt finance and force of arms.

Recently a book called “
The Great Red Dragon” (published in 1890 in America, by L.B. Woolfolk) was brought to our attention by a new member.

 

Although some of its contents seem to us questionable, we were intrigued by its account of how the East India Company, with the aid of debt-finance provided by backers in the City of London, succeeded over a period of time in reducing a prosperous land, well able to live off its own resources, to the status of impecunious client state, with whole sections of its populace suffering endemic deprivation (a feat which has been repeated countless times, since then, by high finance and its incestuously linked corporate associates in many third-world countries).

However, one company, and its monetary facilitators in the City of London, hardly amounts to “the British”, many of whom were living in gutters and slums while merchants and money manipulators built huge fortunes and took control of the economic life of the country, subjecting ordinary people’s wages to the implacable logic of finance.

 

Even if we accept Woolfolk’s claim that companies all over the world were subsequently founded, and are presently controlled, by a strictly limited number of powerful plutocratic interests with their roots in the City of London, this certainly can’t be blamed on the vast mass of ordinary British people.

While fixing a large measure of blame firmly on “the British”, Woolfolk goes further, and identifies these powerful interests in the City as “Jewish”. Here he treads upon dangerous ground. It is quite acceptable to name and shame “the British” (as long as attention is not drawn to the preponderance of Scots among the empire-building traders).

 

Nobody considers it “racist” to accuse “the English”, in particular, of even the most heinous crimes. But to single out “the Jews” in this way is considered offensive - in many countries, criminally so...

As far as we are concerned, discrimination as to which nations may or may not be accused of collective responsibility without the accuser being liable to prosecution is grossly unfair; and lumbering entire nations or races with responsibility for the wrongdoing of a minority in their midst is plain silly. To equate the international banking system with “the Jews” is as wrong-headed as identifying the East India Company and the City of London with “the British”.

Yes, the big banking fraternity includes many very rich people of Jewish origin. It also includes many very rich people who are neither Jewish by birth, nor Zionists by profession, and who have no connection whatever with the State of Israel.

What we are up against here is not a particular race or nation: it is a transnational oligarchy who have no loyalty to any particular race or nation, and who regard the world as their oyster, from which pearls of new wealth may be endlessly extracted, with the help of other people’s ill-paid labour, and a little skilled financial and political manipulation.

It is those at the top of this incestuous alliance of “free”-trading corporations, big finance and governments, not the malign self-seeking of any particular race or nation, which threatens to enslave ordinary people throughout the world.

 

With each new monopolistic takeover, each successive cycle of debt-induced boom and bust, leaving a trail of bankruptcies in its wake, wealth, and the power wealth brings, are being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, and the gulf between the staggeringly rich and the rest of humanity grows wider and deeper.

If anyone needs to be targeted, it's specific individuals, or whatever race or nation, who see fit to exploit their fellow human beings for their own advantage, by manipulation of the present financial system.

It seems to us mistaken to focus on proving the responsibility of particular races or nations for our present sorry financial state, rather than targeting the system itself, and the mechanisms by which small numbers of individuals obtain control over billions.

 

Arguing about whether the British or the Jews or the Masons or the Jesuits are the villains of the piece doesn’t just give many people the impression that money reformers are a lot of crazy conspiracy theorists, chasing all kinds of different quarries into the tangled undergrowth of myth and legend; it wastes valuable time and energy which might otherwise be used to make people aware of the consequences to themselves and their families of using debt as our means of exchange.

 

Instead of seeking to fix the collective blame, we should be doing everything we can to ensure that this most important of all issues is placed at the centre of the popular political agenda.

We believe that the vast majority of British people, together with the vast majority of Jewish people, just like everybody else, suffer, rather than gain, from the present dysfunctional monetary system.

So what about books like “
The Great Red Dragon”?
 
Well, in our opinion people should not be prevented from reading books which investigate various theories on the origins and practice of debt-based finance. Everybody should be free to explore all the available facts, and all the possible implications to be drawn from those facts, and to reach their own conclusions. To put some books or ideas off-limits is what used to be known, in less politically correct times, as censorship.

But remember: the enormously influential push for money reform between the two World Wars lost support when it became associated with anti-Jewish sentiment. Even the penetrating analysis of the financial system by C.H. Douglas was marked down as beyond the pale, and fell into postwar oblivion, because of a focus, in some of his writings, on Jewish involvement in the banking system.

As far as we are concerned, Douglas’s ideas on social credit, stripped of the racial allusions - which, in any case, occupy only a small space in his works - offer a valuable signpost for today’s money reformers.

 

As Frances Hutchinson says, in an article in Sustainable Economics,

"Would the study of social credit really lead impressionable people into setting up Nazi-style death camps?"

The suggestion is, of course, completely ridiculous.

So we’d like to ask our readers, when they talk about money reform to their families and friends and workmates, to focus on the very obvious problems inherent in the system itself, and the mechanisms by which they are perpetuated.

 

The fact that using debt as our means of exchange makes it impossible to deliver a steady flow of goods and services to the population of the world is quite enough to damn it.

Your aim, like ours, should be to spread an intelligent awareness of the issues involved among the wider population, so that pressure for reform from the grass roots pushes proposals for a switch to publicly-created, debt-free money to the top of the political agenda, undermining the position of those who profit from, and therefore seek to perpetuate, the present system.
 

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